Tuesday, April 12, 2011

Moriarty-Leyendecker: Spotlight on Small Smiles

In 1967, Small Smiles was one of the first clinics in the nation to extend dental services to Medicaid patients - a generous and welcome gesture, since Medicaid paid far less than insurance or out-of-pocket payments for dental procedures.

By 2010, Small Smiles was churning through patients at the impossible rate of one every ten minutes. The company's dentists strapped children as young as two into a straitjacket-like device to perform dental procedures. Parents are no longer permitted in the waiting rooms and cannot watch their children as they go through multiple fillings or even intense dental surgery.

Worst of all, the procedures being performed are frequently not medically necessary.

How did this happen? How did such unethical methods spring out of a community-serving dental practice generously willing to take Medicaid patients at a time when few dentists were? Where did it all go wrong?

The answer lies in the owner. Who, it turns out, is remarkably difficult to locate.